


IndiANNa

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Backstory, Coming of Age, Community: femgenficathon, Gen, Methamphetamine, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-08
Updated: 2011-10-08
Packaged: 2017-10-24 09:58:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/262174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one ever asks Ann why she’d want to live here.</p><p>Written for Femgenficathon 2011.</p>
            </blockquote>





	IndiANNa

**Author's Note:**

> I have never been particularly fond of Ann, so when signups came around I thought, this is a chance to try and understand her! Ann’s version of triumph doesn’t necessarily align with my own definition, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t content with the life she’s made.
> 
> Written for femgenficathon 2011, Prompt 23: _“You can’t erase who you are. You can’t erase what you know.”_ – Sandra Cisneros  
> (born December 20, 1954), Mexican-American writer of novels, poems and short stories, teacher, counselor, founder of the Macondo Foundation, a group of poets, novelists, journalists, performance artists, and creative writers of all genres who focus on strengthening their communities and changing the world through their writing, and founder of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards money to writers of exceptional talent and commitment who were born in Texas, are writing about Texas or who are living in Texas. She was the first female Mexican-American writer to have her work published by a mainstream publisher.

Jobs are hard to come by these days, sure, but Ann’s been a nurse for over ten years. Maybe some hospitals wouldn’t hire her now because of what they’d have to pay her—in her head, Ann can hear Leslie chirping that Ann is worth the money, that she is beautiful and good and smart—but experience talks and Ann’s record is pretty good. She has days where she thinks about going back to school for the three semesters it would take to get her nurse practitioner license, and then she thinks of the prescription pad and DEA number that would come with it: she can feel her hands start shaking, a little, just at the idea of it. There are a lot of good things about Indiana, but there’s some bad to go along with it. Ann’s usually able to skirt the issue, at least in her own mind, but she knows what controlled substances can do to a life, what the temptation to redirect prescriptions can do for the gray area. Ann lives a small life, and even if Leslie understands in all the wrong ways, Ann’s content. 

Some days she’s less serene about her schedule—nine years and counting at Saint Joe’s, and the floor still can’t decide if she’s on days or nights, eights or twelves—but that’s mostly her own fault, for not getting married, for not having kids, for dating guys who have no expectation save that she grab a six-pack on the way home. After nine years of showing up, the other nurses are okay with Ann too, and she can believe that no one will kink her IV lines once she leaves a room (nurses eat their young, her instructors used to say, and even though only one girl from Ann’s nursing cohort has lost her license, Ann believes the adage). Realistically, Ann doesn’t have to abide by any schedule other than her own; when she’s had her fill of being needed, she can clock out and go home.

The shift differential isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. Ann has owned her house free and clear for years. 

*  
Even though Andy was an ass, in retrospect, Ann still kind of misses him. He was big and dumb and occasionally sort of mean, but she could usually count on him to be at home. Most of Ann’s family cannot make this claim: after Ann’s father left and her mom got fat, got diabetes, and got bogged down in the ruins of her life, and Ann’s brothers got hooked on crank, Ann had to make of herself what she could. 

What Ann could do was continue to give handjobs under the bleachers, and remain unfazed in her encounters with various bodily fluids. Given the choice between haunting trailer parks (Ann knows that some of the guys she fooled around with were married, or at least had kids) and getting a scholarship and a job that would put her in an actual tax bracket, Ann went with her best option.

All this history doesn’t immediately explain why she still lives in Indiana, twenty minutes from where her family self-destructed. It does not explain why she is working terrible hours at a hospital that mostly caters to drug addicts and diabetics; she could have all this and more in Illinois, possibly with a better salary and definitely with better take-out options. Indiana could be a kind of penance, but save for Christmas and Easter, Ann stopped going to church when she was in nursing school, and she’s never once felt guilty about her life choices. 

*

Ann has been alone for years, in all the ways that count. At some point she got used to the space inhabited solely by Ann, herself: a person-shaped place, steady and safe enough for one. She developed routines, standard orders from the one good take-out restaurant in Pawnee, an unspoken agreement with herself about who she slept with. She called her mother once a year and she always worked holidays. She bailed her brothers out of jail, but only occasionally, and she never gave them money. 

In return, her brothers stole the painkillers she used for menstrual cramps and (once, memorably) her credit card, but that’s love amidst the Perkins family for you: dependable, and a little vacant. 

*

Ann has noticed that other women tend not to like her; it’s lonely, sometimes, but Ann didn’t grow up with sisters, and this kind of reinforces her idea of herself as a desirable creature. She has fond memories of her time beneath the bleachers, feeling so small and so powerful. Ann has always liked practical application, especially when it comes to biology. She doesn’t make excuses—in small-town Indiana, in the 90s, boys played sports or did drugs and drank too much, and girls either went parking or didn’t. “Perkins” is an awful name if that’s the kind of choice you make, but Ann was well versed in the fine art of shutting people up. 

It helped that she knew first aid; during one of the tremendously unsafe parties the seniors used to have out by the train tracks, Tim Hanney had slipped on the shale and tried to catch his fall with on outstretched hand. He cut himself wide open on a broken bottle, skin parting all the way down to bone. Even in the flickering signal lights, the blood had spurted in a way that was deeply unsettling, covering everything—Tim, his shirt, the bottle, the ground—with a hot slick of pigment. It looked darker, in the shaky flashlight beams, than Ann had expected. 

Most of that night is a blur of beer and adrenaline, but Ann remembers gripping Tim’s split hand in her own, her fingers digging into the palm and clamping the punctured artery. He couldn’t stop screaming, or shaking, or bleeding, and she had on his chest until a senior’s underage, mostly sober girlfriend had found the keys to a pickup and driven them to the hospital. 

Later, in the ER, a nurse had helped Ann peel her fingers off Tim’s hand; she had his blood caked under her nails, bronzing her skin almost to the elbow. She scrubbed herself clean in the ladies’ room sink, leaving a mess of paper towels in the trash bin, before a police officer cornered her and demanded a statement. The best part was that she couldn’t even get in trouble for being on the tracks in the first place, because she was a hero. At the end of the year, Tim even asked her to the prom, most likely out of gratitude. Ann turned him down. 

Years later, part of Ann recoils at this memory; she definitely didn’t get tested for anything back then, but it’s not the risk of hepatitis that stays with her, it’s the memory of Tim’s face going slack with shock, his pallor heightened by her own summer tan, the way she could have walked on water afterwards. Tim Hanney became a part of Ann’s high school mythology—they never talked much, after, but Tim had pull, and he must have said something. Ann was a queen in high school, all for keeping a cool head.

It’s not why she became a nurse. Still, it didn’t hurt to slip that story into her personal statement. 

*

Growing up, Ann wasn’t particularly quiet. It didn’t matter until later that her brothers made meth, because everybody’s brothers at least did meth, and the girls who didn’t were too busy figuring out how the rhythm method worked (or, memorably, didn’t work) to look too far down their noses. Small town life has a structure that is tolerable in its own way. 

Still, when Ann’s oldest brother got busted, Ann decided, almost as a reflex, that she was going to go to college, because she wanted a change of scenery, even if she didn’t go very far afield. 

The day before she graduated high school—with honors, thank you very much—her next oldest-brother blew up a barn three miles from the house. It wasn’t a functioning barn or even one that was in any state of repair, but the chemical explosion was audible all over town, and Ann had been outside when the structure had gone up. 

In nursing school, one of her instructors talked about the divide between medicine and folk remedies, about a culture that referred to epilepsy as being caught by a spirit and falling back down. Ann says a lot of things about Pawnee, but at least most of the kids she’s seen are hooked on pot, not crank; she’d cultivate a plantation of weed and peddle it herself, if she thought she’d never have to deal with another lab explosion. 

*

She’s a big fish in a small pond, and some days it’s even like Leslie says: Pawnee is the best place in the world (for right now).


End file.
